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September 22 - October 8, 2025
In 1958 he developed the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, and it’s since become the gold standard for gauging creativity. Torrance had a large group of children in the Minnesota public school system take the exam.
Torrance testing, in fact, smokes IQ testing. A recent study of the kids in Torrance’s study found that creativity was a threefold better predictor of much of the students’ accomplishments compared to their IQ scores.
Even the god of Silicon Valley bought in. Steve Jobs once said, “I’m a big believer in boredom….All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
“Nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
Three or more days in the wild is like a meditation retreat. Except talking is allowed and the experience is free of costs and gurus.
Just, I’d learn, a recognition that discomfort is inherent to physical change—whether losing weight or fueling an athletic goal—and innovative guidance to help people win the inner game of hunger.
if you think processed food is bad, well, then, tell me what you think would happen if we didn’t process food?”
“Processing food is literally the cornerstone of human civilization. Hunting, foraging, and farming only go so far. It’s keeping food that’s hard. It used to be that you could only grow food a few months out of the year and then you’d just pray to whatever deities you worship that the food wouldn’t spoil or be eaten by bugs until the next growing season.”
“Nobody ever has these conversations because they’re so disconnected from food and the food supply chain,” he said. “People think that meat and fresh cucumbers just fucking magically appear. And, let’s face it, pop nutritionists can get a lot more clicks and sell a lot more books by convincing people that food is toxic.
Our brains evolved to release more dopamine when eating calorie-packed foods (think of the pleasure of eating pecan pie versus, like, a raw piece of broccoli). This is why humans crave foods that are sweet, fatty, and/or salty. Those qualities signal that a food is an efficient way to fill our onboard pantry.
Many people today don’t know how to deal with stress. They are neither hardy nor resilient, and they have no shortage of comfort food to distract themselves from stress.”
Kashey indeed has no food ideology. “I don’t care what people eat,” he said. “Just so long as they keep track of it.” Consistently leveraging the Hawthorne effect.
Of course, he said, junk foods come with a tradeoff. Not all foods are created equal when it comes to mitigating reward hunger and fending off disinhibition eating.
“cancer is a multifactorial disease that is fueled by a deranged metabolism.” Which is why they concluded that being at a healthy weight was the number-one thing a person could do to prevent cancer.
A person should mostly be eating unprocessed whole grains*7 and tubers, fruits and vegetables, and lowish-fat animal protein.” These foods lead us to the sweet spot where we find a healthy weight and keep meal satisfaction high, he said.
“An average plate could be a quarter animal protein, a quarter whole grains or tubers, and half vegetables or fruit.
The people of Japan are some of the longest living and least likely to die from heart disease and cancer in the developed world, a fact researchers partially credit to their traditional diet of rice, lean proteins, and vegetables.
We fully metabolize our last meal after 12 to 16 hours, depending on how much we ate. That’s when our body releases testosterone, adrenaline, and cortisol: a symphony of hormones that act as signals to burn stored tissues for energy. But we don’t burn our finest tissues. “We get rid of a lot of dead and damaged cells,” said Panda.
The body’s “taking out the trash” process is officially called autophagy, which translates from ancient Greek as “self-devouring.” Autophagy is, in many ways, a metaphor for what happens to all things under discomfort: Our weak links—whether physical or psychological—are painfully sacrificed for our good.
The research suggests that the body has programmed within it a code to crank up autophagy to repair and rejuvenate itself at night, as it burns through the day’s food.
But our 15-hour daily eating windows disrupt the process, said Panda. They rob our bodies of the 12 to 16 hours we need to fully metabolize food and lapse into autophagy mode. Or, as the Cedars Sinai scientist put it, “If you eat…before bed, you’re not going to have any autophagy. That means you’re not going to take out the trash, so the cells begin to accumulate more and more debris.”
“The ability to function at a high level, both physically and mentally, during our extended periods without food may have been of fundamental importance in our evolutionary history,” wrote that team of scientists.
This is likely why we often define the word “hunger” as not just discomfort from a lack of food but also as ambitious drive. It’s a drive that crosses animalistic distinctions.
people who stop eating a few hours before bed sleep better, said Panda. “So if you sleep longer and deeper, you’re likely to be more focused the next day.”
fad diet marketing, which has programmed us to ask, “What should I eat?” when we want to improve our health. Going without food and feeling some real hunger is often far more powerful.
simply nixing breakfast hits the “sweet spot for practicality” in reacquainting a person with hunger, said Panda. It allows the body to go 12 to 16 hours without a calorie, which goes “a long way toward preventing diseases, increasing alertness and energy,”
And we must also understand and adapt to the fact that much of our hunger isn’t real physiological hunger. Rather, it’s often a cheap coping mechanism to comfort us against the discomforts of modern life.
But this morning I recalled a line that’s helped me stay sober—“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today”—and applied it to my current condition. I quit fighting the elements, hunger, landscape, etc. “How you doing?” asks Donnie. “I’m good!” I respond, surprising myself with my positivity.
Some guys are even using rifles and tech to shoot a thousand yards. That’s not hunting. That’s a video game. Those guys are so far away that even if the animal could see them it probably wouldn’t consider them a threat.”
The king told a reporter, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.” He was espousing the idea that economic growth isn’t an end in itself but rather a means to achieve a more important end, which is happiness. So why not just figure out what makes people happy and chase that?
ignoring mitakpa often leads a person to believe that “things will be better when I do x.” A false sense of permanence can cause a person to put off the things they truly want to do, thinking, “I can do that when I retire.”
“How often should I be thinking about mitakpa?” I asked. “You must think of mitakpa three times each day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once in the evening.
You must be curious about your death. You must understand that you don’t know how you will die or where you will die. Just that you will die. And that death can come at any time,” he said.
This pursuit of holistically connecting to nature—mind, body, spirit—through hunting is likely why backcountry hunting has grown over the past decade.
Humans over millennia developed a complex network of physical discomforts and psychological “governors” to dissuade us from effort, because effort requires energy, or calories, which in the past was precious. This is why we seemingly have an ingrained call to laziness.
There’s science behind this. Brazilian researchers found that people who are able to detach from their emotions during exercise—for example, not thinking about or putting a negative valence on their burning lungs and legs—almost always perform better. And I’ll take whatever I can get right now.
Our ancestors often rested in the squat position, which required they lightly activate nearly every muscle in their body or else topple over.
Scientists say our impossible laziness—once exceedingly rare—is leading to dangerously low levels of muscle. This condition is called sarcopenia, which is the loss of muscle mass and function, and it’s now creeping into younger populations for the first time in any species in all of history.
Even modern athletes are unimpressive compared to a run-of-the-mill ancient. The arms of the average prehistoric woman, for example, were 16 percent stronger than those of today’s Olympic rowers, according to scientists at the University of Cambridge.
The truth is, every human body can achieve amazing physical feats when it’s forced to.
How’d we become the least fit humans of all time? “Technologies often end up reducing our physical activity levels,” said Raichlen.
Or we sit on a padded seat, resting our joints against another pad, and move ergonomic handles attached to a stack of weights along a fixed movement path. Another situation that is physically easier than anything we’d ever face in nature, and that neglects important stabilizing muscles.
In the free-weight room we lift perfectly balanced weights of our choosing a predetermined number of times. But research shows that the awkwardly shaped objects our ancestors lifted worked far more muscles compared to the balanced weights we lift at the gym. And we lifted those loads until the job was done.
Humans today rarely do one of the most consequential acts of our forefathers: carrying heavy stuff over rough land. But emerging research is showing that it’s an act that made us human.
On a hot day a relatively fit human will beat every other mammal in a distance race—lions, tigers, bears, dogs, etc.
Endurance was our killer app and as we evolved we used it to our advantage on hot days with persistence hunting: slowly but surely tracking and running down prey for miles upon miles until the animal toppled over from heat exhaustion.
Lieberman’s paper also suggested that human running mechanics fundamentally changed with the introduction of cushiony, comfortable running shoes in the 1970s. Those shoes typically lead a person to first strike the ground with their heel. Early humans running barefoot likely first struck the ground with the middle or front of their feet.
Our most radical strength feats were muscling loads great distances over rough ground. Humans are, in fact, “extreme” in their ability to move items from point A to B,
“Ruck” is both a noun and a verb. It’s a thing and an action. It’s military-speak for the heavy backpack that carries all of the items a soldier needs to fight a war.
After graduating from college, McCarthy dreamed of doing James Bond-type stuff for the CIA. But a year into the recruiting process an agent had bad news. “We don’t train agents for special operations,” the agent said. “We just recruit those guys from military Special Forces units, where they’ve already been trained.”
